EGMONT AND HIS ROMANCES.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 447, 10 November 1904, Page 2

EGMONT AND HIS ROMANCES.

The career of the Earl of Egmont, who is forty-eight, and a prominent figure in London Society, was marked by romances before he came unexpectedly into the title seven years ago. Himself the eight holder of the earldom, he is a descendant of the second earl by that peer's second marriage with Miss Cornpton, afterwards created Baroness Arden in the peerage of Ireland, and.a kinsman of Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister who was assassinated by mad Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. One of the grandsons of the second earl was the Bev. Arthur Philip Perceval, one of the earliest of Queen Victoria's chaplains. His second son, Charles John, a lieutenant in the old 47th, settled in the Antipodes. He married three times, and from his union with Miss Eleanor Matthews the present peer was borninNew Zealand in 1856. He was intended [for tho Navy, but his destiny took him before the mast, and for twenty, years he served on vessels trading to the East. In 1881 he married in London the daughter of Mr Warwick Howell, of South Carolina, and settled down, with varying fortunes, in town. At one time he was hall keeper of Chelsea Town Hall, and it is recorded of him that he quenched a political storm there by turning the hose upon the rival disputants. Later on, coming into a legacy of £B,OOO, he invested it in a cement business'at West Drayton, and lost the whole of it. ; Still later he tried'bis fortune at the Cape. Then oame the death of his cousin, the seventh earl, and his succession to the title. I'